"What you see is what we've got," said a bemused Phil Worley, an emergency-services manager monitoring the storm at the Apalachicola Airport where the skies were bright gray and defiantly dry.

With only scattered showers Thursday, Worley said there was just minor flooding reported, largely because of recent rains that had already saturated the ground.

But later Thursday, Bonnie moved across North Florida, bringing heavy rains to the Jacksonville area. Witnesses reported the storm spun off a tornado there that caused about a 100-yard swath of damage Thursday afternoon, including a few overturned cars.

There were no reports of injuries.

From there it entered Georgia, where it began to lose its tropical characteristics. Hurricane forecasters in Miami said a trough of low pressure in the upper atmosphere sheared off Bonnie's upper-level winds, turning it into the elongated blob it was when it made landfall.

"It was a sorry storm," Max Mayfield, director of the National Hurricane Center, said. "I apologized to my father-in-law up near Apalachicola this morning [Thursday] because, like a good citizen, he put up his hurricane shutters."

The bridge across Apalachicola Bay to the barrier island of St. George remained open throughout the storm. The island was mostly deserted of tourists, although some businesses and restaurants remained open. Owners of many oceanfront homes and businesses decided not to board up windows as the storm approached.

Just up the Gulf Coast from Apalachicola in Port St. Joe, new San Diego transplants Gail Alsobrook and her daughter Kate said their first hurricane scare ended happily.

"The sun is shining, there are a few white clouds in the sky and there is barely a hint of a breeze," Gail Alsobrook said.

Six weeks ago, the two moved from San Diego into an oceanfront home that has been in the family for 80 years. They had been preparing for their first hurricane season by studying old newspaper articles of hurricanes past, which they had found in the house.

"We're reading about what happened when Hurricane Kate went through and wondering where the weather is today," Alsobrook said.